Pickup Lines From Bond

One Man Tried A Night Out Using Pick-up Lines From Bond Movies. Here's How It Went

Even Bond villains have a little more class and panache than most men prowling the dating scene these days. If I were a woman, I think I’d be more impressed with the deadly top hat and impeccable morning suit of Odd Job in Goldfinger than I would be by the standard beige shirt and lager combo of many single men crowding around bar counters; especially when the amount of aftershave applied is so excessive as to make me reel away retching as a victim of what I think must be called ‘passive shaving’.

But what of 007 himself? His pick-up lines are as smoothly applied and as consistently successful as a martini poured from God's own drinks cabinet. But in the dank, dark and often furtive reality of singles bars, I felt it was time to find out for sure if the lines Bond has pulled over the years could ever result in a non-secret service plebeian like myself (who don’t even own a dinner jacket, let alone one with a wet suit underneath) gaining intimate access to a modern day Ursula Andress.

So, dressed in what I considered to be something approaching ‘Connery Casual’ (tight fitting polo shirt, moderate amount of pomade, mildly ironed slacks and some bloody expensive brogues) I arrived in a central London bar notorious for the amount of tipsy, approachable single women present on a mid-week evening.

Armed with a martini and laden with some of my favourite Bond quips I decided the approach should be the languid cool of Daniel Craig but with just the right amount of eyebrow-raised irony perfected by Roger Moore. Obviously I was nowhere near the honeyed charm and looks of either, but as I reasoned, if I don’t go through this evening with a more than half reasonable opinion of myself, then I’m not going to get anywhere, Bond lines or no Bond lines.

Straight in with some classic Moore from The Man with the Golden Gun to start off with. A red headed girl showing an inordinate amount of cleavage was the recipient.

“I, er, didn’t recognise you with your clothes on", I quip.

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on.”

She laughs. She actually laughs. And not in an, 'am I about to be murdered?’ way.

We then go into a discussion about a time when she did get naked on a girls holiday on a boat in Malia. She clearly doesn’t fancy me though and so runs the first rule of Real Bond Lines: women will almost always find them amusing. But, as Michael Caine so famously said in Alfie: "Don’t make a girl laugh too much. Otherwise that’s all you’ll get."

So onto Brosnan and a line from the under-rated Tomorrow Never Dies.

Overhearing a girl with a European accent tottering towards the bar on some high heels, I paraphrase from the script slightly to avoid sounding like a complete lunatic:

“Are you from Denmark?”

“No, Netherlands,” she frostily replies.

“Ah, I’d love to brush up on some Dutch,” I reply, squirming slightly.

“OK”, she replies and walks off, presumably to call the police and fetch her pepper spray.

Conclusion to this exchange: Brosnan lines are rubbish. And the Dutch mentality remains brilliantly, inscrutably blunt.

A quick bathroom break to touch up on the pomade and it’s time for two more attempts which I’m really hoping is going to stop making me feel less like Bond and more like Alan Partridge.

Sauntering as cockily as I can up to a group of rather inebriated office girls I propose a leonine looking brunette with a Moore pearl from The Spy Who Loved Me.

“If you put some of your clothes back on then I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

She laughs nervously.

“I actually do really like ice cream. But I don’t want to wear any more clothes.”

Intriguing. And a ten minute conversation ensues which veers more towards her fashion choices in winter than towards a future bedroom seduction for my liking.

Still, she wasn’t repelled by the line. And things might have gone further were it not for her boyfriend appearing half way through the conversation, putting his arms around her and giving me a look which indicated he’d like nothing more than to repeatedly whack my head against the base of a street lamp.

It’s getting late now, the music in the bar is louder and the dance floor is starting to fill. Time for one last throw of the Bond conversational dice:

Harking back to Connery in Dr. No, I bend down and pretend to adjust the tongue on my shoes.

It works.

“Are you looking for something?” asks a golden haired woman with a rather posh accent, almost perfectly replicating Ursula Andress’s line.

“No,” I craftily reply. “I’m just looking.”

She giggles. And offers me some of her vodka. And before you know it we’re talking. And dancing. And then talking again. I still haven’t let her know my quest for the night but she seems to understand the answers I’m looking for through some kind of wonderful female telepathy.

“I knew there was nothing wrong with your shoes,” she confided as we snuggle into a corner booth of the bar. “But a cheesy line is better than what most blokes in London do which is just grab you round your waist from behind on the dance floor and grind their groin into you.”

Fair point. And my line didn’t go unrewarded. A lengthy kiss ensued at the end of the night along with swapped phone numbers and a few carefully worded warnings from her that she didn’t do dates in chain pubs and she was sick of blokes who think that ‘going Dutch’ on the bill is acceptable.

But of course I know all this stuff already. Because I’m James Bond aren’t I?

Or at least I thought I was. Until I realised the next morning that I’d left my phone on the night bus and trodden my bloody expensive brogues in some fried chicken on the way home.

I may be able to plagiarise a few 007 lines to reasonable effect. But in the hierarchy of Bond, I’m still very clearly at George Lazenby levels of success.